In the early days of the famous Emacs/Vim debates, Emacs was often ridiculed for its bulkiness (Eight Megabytes-of-RAM And Constantly Swapping, etc.). The computational power of our computer has grown much faster than Emacs’ bloat: it takes exactly one second to load on my machine. However, our workflows have also changed, and my workflow implies frequently starting new text editors — on each git commit for example, or when I use a Firefox extension to edit a textarea content in a proper editor.

In this blog post, I describe how to use emacsclient to reuse an existing Emacs process when creating a new editor window, which reduces editor startup times from 1s to 0.150s on my machine.